Professor Briggs began to have doubts about some of the miracles. These doubts, like rats, began to gnaw the foundations of his faith. He examined these wonderful stories in the light of what is known to have happened, and in the light of like miracles found in the other sacred books of the world. And he concluded that they were not quite true. He was not ready to say that they were actually false; that would be too brutally candid.
I once read of an English lord who had a very polite gamekeeper. The lord wishing to show his skill with the rifle fired at a target. He and the gamekeeper went to see where the bullet had struck. The gamekeeper was first at the target, and the lord cried out: "Did I miss it?"
"I would not," said the gamekeeper, "go so far as to say that your lordship missed it, but—but—you didn't hit it."
Professor Briggs saw clearly that the Bible was the product, the growth of many centuries; that legends and facts, mistakes, contradictions, miracles, myths and history, interpolations, prophecies and dreams, wisdom, foolishness, justice, cruelty, poetry and bathos were mixed, mingled and interwoven. In other words, that the gold of truth was surrounded by meaner metals and worthless stones.
He saw that it was necessary to construct what might be called a sacred smelter to divide the true from the false.
Undoubtedly he reached this conclusion in the interest of what he believed to be the truth. He had the mistaken but honest idea that a Christian should really think. Of course, we know that all heresy has been the result of thought. It has always been dangerous to grow. Shrinking is safe.
Studying the Bible was the first mistake that Professor Briggs made, reasoning was the second, and publishing his conclusions was the third. If he had read without studying, if he had believed without reasoning, he would have remained a good, orthodox Presbyterian. He probably read the works of Humboldt, Darwin and Haeckel, and found that the author of Genesis was not a geologist, not a scientist. He seems to have his doubts about the truth of the story of the deluge. Should he be blamed for this? Is there a sensible man in the wide world who really believes in the flood?
This flood business puts Jehovah in such an idiotic light.
Of course, he must have known, after the "fall" of Adam and Eve, that he would have to drown their descendants. Certainly it would have been more merciful to have killed Adam and Eve, made a new pair and kept the serpent out of the Garden of Eden. If Jehovah had been an intelligent God he never would have created the serpent. Then there would have been no fall, no flood, no atonement, no hell.
Think of a God who drowned a world! What a merciless monster! The cruelty of the flood is exceeded only by its stupidity.